Northwest Syria Cash Working Group Earthquake Response Bulletin

1. MPC response overview

As of 11 April 2023, a total of 448,317 persons or 90,324 families have been reached by MPC interventions. A total of USD 13.3 million has been disbursed by 17 implementing agencies across 28 sub-districts.

With only certain exceptions (such as activities specified as non-MPC cash-for-food), only beneficiaries who have received at least USD 100/family/month have been included.

448,000 people reached with MPC, USD 13.3 million disbursed, 11 April 2023

governorate	district	communities	partners	households	beneficiaries	total_usd	%_beneficiariesb
Aleppo	A'zaz	5	7	2,994	14,578	424,067	3.25
Aleppo	Afrin	75	10	25,162	125,312	3,726,192	27.95
Aleppo	Al Bab	3	2	998	5,011	137,791	1.12
Aleppo	Jarablus	1	3	589	2,805	88,350	0.63
Aleppo	Jebel Saman	15	8	9,226	53,754	1,380,550	11.99
Idleb	Harim	38	13	43,136	204,566	6,273,250	45.63
Idleb	Idleb	17	10	5,634	28,502	879,372	6.36
Idleb	Jisr-Ash-Shugur	21	3	2,585	13,789	350,200	3.08
Total	-	-	-	90,324	448,317	13,259,772	100.00
bAs percentage of all MPC beneficiaries reached in NW Syria;

177,525 beneficiaries were reached in February 2023 and 200,330 were reached in March 2023. 52,252 have been reached so far in April 2023.Changes in numbers of persons reached were due to cleaning and verification of the dataset – this process is still ongoing and will only be completed once the CWG fully transitions to 4W reporting.

1.1 Progress by date

The small number of beneficiaries reached earlier than February all pertained to the HRP, the only such beneficiaries reported so far. It is unclear if this is the extent of all January achievements.

2. Map of activities

3. Geographic breakdown of beneficiaries

Coverage continues to be highest in Afrin and Harim districts, which have been worst-hit by the earthquake.

Casualties and damaged houses, absolute figures and per 100,000 persons

governorate	district	wounded_dead1	wounded_dead_100k1	damaged_houses1	damaged_houses_100k1
Aleppo	A'zaz	356	57.87	276	44.86
Aleppo	Afrin	2,232	478.79	2,910	624.22
Aleppo	Al Bab	206	70.04	832	282.89
Aleppo	Jarablus	40	33.82	257	217.30
Aleppo	Jebel Saman	616	236.80	176	67.66
Idleb	Harim	8,449	507.65	3,230	194.07
Idleb	Idleb	350	48.23	946	130.37
Idleb	Jisr-Ash-Shugur	595	183.68	1,915	591.18
1Data from the Assistance Coordination Unit, Syria 20230328;

Below is a breakdown of beneficiaries based on whether they originate from camps or villages:

More than twice as many beneficiaries from villages as from camps

village_camps	beneficiaries	%_beneficiaries
camp	94,430	21.06
village	228,690	51.01
NA	125,197	27.93

3.1 By sub-district

The plots below show the breakdown of beneficiaries by sub-district. Caution must be taken to ensure that allocations are fair across the affected areas: there are numerous sub-districts where a very large proportion of the total population has already been reached by multi-purpose cash, in particular, Jandairis, Hairm, Salqin and Sharan.

Response activities must be proportional with the magnitude and severity of earthquake damage. Overallocation deprives affected persons of the aid they are due.

The average percentage of the population reached, of all sub-districts, is 10.63%.

3.2 Comparisons with PIN and earthquake damage

The plot below shows the total population of each sub-district on the x-axis (for the moment, all persons in these areas are assumed to be affected and are included in the PIN) and the number of beneficiaries on the y-axis.

The size of each point indicates the number of dead or wounded persons there per 100,000.

The higher or lower a sub-district is above the blue line, the more disproportionate the number of beneficiaries allocated to that location are.

This should also be compared to each sub-district’s share of the earthquake damage. Of particular note, sub-districts in grey have yet to receive any MPC assistance.

The CWG is currently working on a prioritisation score, which can be a useful shorthand, that will take into account pre-existing vulnerability (likely from the MSNA) as well as earthquake impacts.

3.3 Planned activities

4. Cash response actors and cash disbursed

In the scatterplot below, each point is a single cash working group partner. The x-axis indicates the number of beneficiaries reached per agency and the y-axis indicates the number of communities (admin4) reached.

USD 13.3 million has been distributed across 174 communities and 28 sub-districts in NW Syria.

The table below summarises the information in the scatterplot above in tabular form:

Reach and footprint of cash response actors

implementing_partner1	beneficiaries	districts	communities
CBRTWG-006	67,989	3	20
People in Need (PIN)	36,144	3	25
GOAL (GOAL)	34,310	3	70
CBRTWG-010	33,115	5	15
Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)	20,900	2	5
CBRTWG-035	14,197	5	27
Mercy Without Limits	13,016	4	10
Bahar Organization (BO)	12,000	1	1
Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED)	10,481	7	28
Uluslararasi Insani Yardimlasma Dernegi (IYD)	10,351	4	16
Syria Relief	9,750	5	7
Ihsan for Relief and Development	8,655	5	16
World Vision International (WVI)	7,008	1	4
Welthungerhilfe (WHH)	4,830	4	4
Ataa Humanitarian Relief Association (ATAA)	3,060	1	2
MASRRAT	2,692	3	3
Elaf for relief and development	1,750	1	1
1Only partners who provided more than USD 100/family/month;

4.1 USD disbursed per partner

USD disbursed and families reached by partner

implementing_partner	total_usd	families	usd_per_fam	%_usd_total
GOAL (GOAL)	2,998,650	19,991	150.00	22.61
CBRTWG-006	1,773,750	11,825	150.00	13.38
CBRTWG-010	1,590,100	11,287	140.88	11.99
Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC)	1,266,450	8,443	150.00	9.55
People in Need (PIN)	927,450	6,183	150.00	6.99
Ihsan for Relief and Development	854,250	5,695	150.00	6.44
Syria Relief	724,500	4,830	150.00	5.46
Agency for Technical Cooperation and Development (ACTED)	515,350	3,373	152.79	3.89
Mercy Without Limits	438,372	3,325	131.84	3.31
CBRTWG-035	409,800	4,098	100.00	3.09
Uluslararasi Insani Yardimlasma Dernegi (IYD)	375,000	2,500	150.00	2.83
Bahar Organization (BO)	360,000	2,400	150.00	2.71
Welthungerhilfe (WHH)	344,400	2,296	150.00	2.60
World Vision International (WVI)	301,200	2,008	150.00	2.27
Ataa Humanitarian Relief Association (ATAA)	177,000	1,180	150.00	1.33
Elaf for relief and development	122,500	350	350.00	0.92
MASRRAT	81,000	540	150.00	0.61

The CWG is currently working with other Clusters to consolidate all cash-based activities and will soon be able to provide more comprehensive reporting.

5. Annexes

5.1 Interactive reference table at sub-district level

Columns include: governorate, district, sub-district, total population, beneficiaries, total usd disbursed, wounded and dead, wounded and dead per 100k, damaged houses, damaged houses per 100k, admin3pcode

5.2 Reporting quality

This section documents issues encountered in the cleaning of 4W and FSL data and their impacts on the quality of reporting the CWG can provide.

Note that substantial cleaning has already taken place and these outstanding issues could not be resolved by the time of reporting.

However, the CWG recognises that not all reporting issues were due to partner error. The CWG will work with partners to continue improving reporting quality.

Still, one third of reporting originates from the FSL tracker

source	partners	beneficiaries	%_beneficiaries
4ws	11	308,417	68.79
fsl_tracker	7	139,900	31.21

Below is a breakdown of reporting by date:

January reporting is still largely incomplete

month	partners	beneficiaries	%_beneficiaries
Jan	2	3,778	0.84
Feb	8	177,525	39.60
Mar	10	200,330	44.68
Apr	5	52,252	11.66
	1	14,432	3.22

Activities pertaining to 14,432 were missing their date or had dates in unreadable formats. However, the columns start date, end date and month of reporting were some of the most troublesome and consumed a large part of the time dedicated to data cleaning.

The CWG would like to reiterate that start date and end date should be entered in the format mm/dd/yyyy and that month of reporting should be selected from the dropdown menu.

12 partners have reported planned activities

project_status	partners	beneficiaries	%_beneficiaries
Completed	17	448,317	87.83
Planned	12	62,129	12.17
Suspended	1	0	0.00

The sum of planned beneficiaries is 62,129. If this is the extent of all planned MPC activities, the CWG as a whole can expect to reach around 77% of its target of 662,942 persons.

Below is a breakdown of planned actitivities by source:

Breakdown of planned activities by source

source	partners	beneficiaries	%_beneficiaries
4ws	7	40,542	65.25
fsl_tracker	5	21,587	34.75

5.3 Disaggregations

Of the 565 rows reported through the 4Ws (the FSL tracker does not ask for beneficiary disaggregations), only 32 have any values for the numbers of elderly persons reached.

The total number of elderly persons reached by the CWG partners is 3,190. The total number of beneficiaries reached is 448,317.

It is unclear how able partners are to comply with sex- and age-disaggregated reporting. 452 of the 565 rows reported through the 4Ws contain some form of sex-and-age disaggregation. Of these, only 366 rows have not copy/pasted the disaggregations from the MSNA (13% men, 27% women, 28% boys and 31% girls). For analysis purposes, these have been discarded. In future, it is always preferable to leave disaggregation columns blank as opposed to including values that have been backfilled from a census or a survey, especially as this backfilling will be done by OCHA as a final step in reporting anyway.

This is a histogram of the remaining values:

This differs quite significantly from what we would expect to see in the general population and is indicative of “unnatural” data i.e. copy/pasting or broad estimations, as opposed to actual counts. The peaks around 49% and 50% show that these same percentages were copy/pasted onto a large number of rows.

For reference, this the percentage of males as a proportion of the people in need per sub-district. The distribution is roughly normal and we can see that these are “real” figures.

Until such time copy/pasted values are excluded from the sex-and-age disggregations, it would be incorrect to estimate the number of men, women, boys and girls reached from the 4W values. This also means that it is not possible to determine if there is a skew towards either sex in our current programming.